The purpose of this course is to expose students to major works, writers, and literary movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Readings include texts by Colette, Proust, Mauriac, Sartre, Camus, and Sarraute. Our discussions will address the intellectual and philosophical issues raised by their novels, such as proto-feminism, existentialism, notions of the absurd, memory, and forgetting. We will likewise study the narrative and stylistic innovations that make their works classics of the twentieth-century French tradition. By the end of the semester, students will have acquired better skills for close textual analysis, writing, and oral expression. This course fulfills the upper-division post-1800 literature requirement for the French major.